The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  The first became inconsequential. Although the effective cause of his arrest—Bernard had traveled to Avignon in 1317 to defend the Spirituals of Languedoc—support for them was not what the judges were attempting to pin on him. The Spirituals were being fiercely denounced by then as heretics, and Bernard freely admitted to being sympathetic to their cause, but he had to confess to crimes that were uniquely his, separate from the intra-Franciscan fracas that was rocking the Church. Punishing him solely for that would have set him up for martyrhood among a dissident faction of the Order. Besides, one can suspect that Fournier and Mostuéjouls, respectively a Cistercian and a Benedictine, had little time for the self-inflicted woes of the self-important mendicants. As such, his belonging to the Spiritual movement occupied almost no time during the three-month proceeding.

  The treason charge formed the subject of Bernard’s first of many appearances in the dock at Carcassonne, on October 2. Why the Church was trying him in this matter remains open to question. If King Philip had not given assurances that Bernard had been absolved, then Pope Clement never would have let the Franciscan leave the curia at Avignon to go to Béziers. One sees here the same reasoning behind the conflict surrounding Bernard Saisset: Délicieux was a churchman, ergo he had to be tried by a Church court jealous of its prerogatives. If, in the future, Philip’s successors wished to resurrect the charges, the reasoning went, he could not be tried by royal justice. So he would be tried in Carcassonne about that matter now, by the Church. Added to that institutional scruple was the far weightier reality that Pope John wanted to throw everything he could at Bernard.

  We know, from the narrative constructed of the events at Saint-Jean-Pla-de-Corts earlier, that Bernard confessed to his treasonous activity (his confession was supplemented by two witnesses to the stormy scene between King Jaume and his son). What retains attention in the story of his trial is the way in which the confession was extracted. In his first appearance, Bernard gave a patently unbelievable story about how he had broken up the plot, in what was a grave underestimation of the acumen of his judges. Many of the witnesses called from Carcassonne and Albi, including Bernard’s former allies, had testified that this was not the case. Fournier must have been insulted. He ordered Bernard tortured—not severely, to avoid incapacitating him or causing organ failure, but tortured nonetheless. The notaries of the transcript duly noted his cries of pain and distress but did not specify the technique used. We can infer that on this or a subsequent occasion a few weeks later it may have been the strappado, being suspended from a beam with one’s distended arms tied behind one’s back, given a reference late in the transcript to Bernard’s badly damaged hands.

  In the event, Bernard confessed nothing to the torturer. But he did sleep on the matter and offer a partial confession on October 4. This, too, was dubious, but here the skill of Fournier and his colleague emerged—the treason discussion was shelved for the moment, and subsequent interrogations covered other matters entirely. In what would come to be a pattern in October and November, Bernard did not know what he was going to be asked about when he was unshackled and taken into the bishop’s palace. The seemingly scattershot approach may have been unfair, designed to confuse and confound the accused, but when the prosecutor was judge no holds were barred. Bernard must at last have realized that he had gotten what he wished for: judges who were equal to his gifts.

  In the thicket of interrogation sessions the matter of the killing of the pope arose on October 27 and November 17. The passing of a prominent personage in the Middle Ages almost always occasioned such suspicions, in the same way that secular courts usually got around to charging whoever was the enemy of the moment with sodomy, heresy, blasphemy, and the like. In this part of the charge sheet against him there were nonetheless several important pieces of circumstantial evidence. Three men of Albi—those who were deposed in Avignon in June 1319—claimed to have been in Bernard’s presence in the spring of 1304 when he prepared a mysterious package to be sent to his friend Arnaud de Vilanova, then in Perugia locked in conflict with the Dominican pope, Benedict XI, resident there. Further, Bernard had said not long before the pope’s sudden death that no bird could fly to Rome fast enough from Languedoc to see the pontiff alive. And, last, found in the possessions Bernard had entrusted to a notary of Béziers before leaving for Avignon in 1317 was a book of necromancy and spells, its margins covered in annotations by a reader. The Franciscan rule forbade such books, so he had transgressed.

  As with the story of treason, Bernard made implausible denials. The book was not his, or perhaps it was. He may have read a few pages, but he had forgotten everything. And those notes in the margin could not possibly be his. Exasperated once again, on November 20 his judges ordered him tortured, and his screams were once again duly noted. Again he admitted nothing. On reflection, several days later he admitted to owning and marking up the magic book, but he vehemently denied having any hand in the death of the pope. He did not add the obvious—that the immensely learned Arnaud de Vilanova would hardly have needed a tutorial on magic from France to pharmaceutically terminate anyone he pleased.

  The bulk of the interrogations concerned his actions against the inquisitors. These testimonies in the transcripts—the accounts given by the dozens of witness—breathe life into the ambush at the convent, the appeal of Castel Fabre, the audience at Senlis, the colorful sermons, the taking of the Wall, the disputation at Toulouse, the silver vases. What compels in considering the conduct of the trial is the way in which an ever-weakening Délicieux and an ever-vigilant Fournier—two great minds and consciences—dueled for almost two months.

  The judges uncovered events in Délicieux’s life in the same seemingly unmethodical but entirely destabilizing manner of unexpected return to subjects already raised. Fournier also raised the question of the disputed inquisition registers. Welcoming the opportunity, Bernard demolished them. He told a lengthy and entirely credible story of a Dominican friar, no less, warning a prelate of Narbonne of their outright falsehoods. Bernard named the inquisition clerks he believed behind what was essentially a scheme to keep the inquisition active in Carcassonne so that the two clerks, both men of the south, could retain their feared positions and collect the fortunes confiscated. He enumerated once again his complaints about imaginary Good Men, then recited a devastating taxonomy of the type of people whom the inquisitors of the 1280s and 1290s convicted and despoiled: they were always dead, thus defenseless; they had always been hereticated on their deathbed; they were never accused of heresy while alive; many of those who supposedly attended such heretications never knew the deceased until that moment, and were only in turn accused after their own decease; and, most damningly, the living witnesses to the heretications, the informants, were never pursued. Bernard’s arguments, given in a steady voice in the stone chamber, were not challenged by the court. Fournier must have known the friar was right, for he was aware of the workings of inquisition and the opportunities for abuse.

  The bishop of Pamiers, however, had been sent to do a job, which he did on his own terms. Fournier was, above all, a man of principle—however much his prosecutorial ethic is unappealing to most modern eyes. Unlike many of his fellow churchmen, he was not venal or nepotistic. Alone among Avignon popes, Fournier, as Benedict XII, tried to rein in the circus of luxury by the Rhône. Yet in 1319, he had been clearly charged by Pope John to take down Bernard one way or the other. The challenge for Jacques Fournier lay in how to do this in a way that he thought just. It is bold but not unreasonable to conjecture that this brilliant, principled prosecutor did not really care about the other charges: he could have seen the murder charge as the usual farrago of fantastic rumor, the long-dead treason conspiracy as an exercise in the Church’s guarding its jurisdictional turf, the Spiritual affiliation as a matter of mendicant madness. Efficient and workmanlike, he and his colleague had wrung out confessions on the last two charges and a ringing denial on the first. But only the matter of inquisition—for which, significantly, tort
ure was not applied—could give Fournier satisfaction.

  In late October, he threw the book at Bernard. In a written warning, the judges told Bernard that he had been an excommunicate for years. They spelled out the law of the inquisitors: anyone who caused to be released from the custody of the inquisition any duly convicted prisoner, without the permission of the competent church authority (inquisitor or bishop), was automatically, as a result of that action, excommunicated. And if the situation was not rectified within a year and the excommunication not lifted, that person was a heretic.

  Faced with this sobering statute, Bernard confessed his role in undoing the work of the inquisitors and asked for absolution. Despite this admission, the judges knew it was insufficient. Public sentiment held that the conduct of inquisition in Languedoc in the two decades prior to the year 1300 had been scandalous. Bernard had merely confessed to opposing unjust inquisitors—which was what he had been arguing all along. The judges needed more than a confirmation of what everyone already knew and not a few still applauded.

  If Fournier silently agreed with Bernard about the iniquitous registers and incompetent or corrupt inquisitors, he had to establish that the Franciscan’s antipathy went far beyond that. Bernard maintained that he had gone only after particular inquisitors, not the inquisition. Both men knew the significance of the distinction. Arguing for the destruction of the inquisition, the sanctified tool for combating heresy, aided and abetted heresy. That was a capital crime. It was not, like freeing the prisoners, an action that triggered an automatic excommunication measure. It was not tantamount to heresy—it was heresy, not stumbled into through the expiration of a one-year grace period but held sincerely and criminally over time.

  The dance between the two men on this fundamental matter continued throughout the month of November. Fournier stated that witnesses had spoken of a system of anti-inquisitorial opposition that Bernard had wanted to make permanent. A witness deposed in Avignon on June 7, 1319, had stated in a matter-of-fact manner that Bernard’s goal in going to Senlis for his momentous audience was “to ensure the inquisition was completely paralyzed and persuade the king of France to abolish it altogether.” There were damning letters to consuls of Languedoc towns, demanding money for organizing. Bernard allowed that he might have overstepped his bounds as a simple Franciscan friar, but it was all in the service of fighting the unjust among the inquisitors. Around 1300, Bernard had claimed that there were no heretics left in Languedoc, yet that had been demonstrably proven untrue in subsequent years. In an exchange of November 8, Fournier asked a seemingly innocent question: who, at time of the disputation of Toulouse in 1304, were the inquisitors at Carcassonne and Toulouse? Bernard gave the names: Geoffroy d’Ablis and Guillaume de Morières. Yet they were not the ones Bernard had earlier identified to the court as objectionable, namely, Jean Galand, Guillaume de Saint-Seine, Foulques de Saint-Georges, and Nicolas d’Abbeville. They no longer held office at the time of the disputation, when Délicieux had lectured the king on diagnosing and extirpating an illness. The implication of this point of fact was clear: the friar would never approve of an inquisitor, any inquisitor.

  November drew to a close. Bernard was failing, the constant interrogations and traps having taken their toll. So too had torture and captivity. Fournier, sensing the kill, opted then to take out his heaviest cudgel. Bernard was informed he had a choice. He could stop all his cavils and evasions on the charges, confess to obstructing not just inquisitors but the inquisition as a whole, thereby aiding heresy, and then ask for forgiveness, or he could persist in his denials and excuses. If he chose the latter, he should be under no illusion: he would then be convicted on the charge of heresy, which would incur excommunication, execution, and an eternity in Hell.

  The Franciscan was given a few days to think it over. Now that his body was broken, he had to think of his soul.

  On December 3, he was brought before Fournier and Mostuéjouls. He had decided to end the exhausting game of cat-and-mouse. The germane passage of the transcript reads: “[The judges], seeking and attempting to effect the conversion of Brother Bernard and the salvation of his soul, warned him once, twice, thrice and demanded he confess without any further diversions and frivolous excuses to having favored the heretics and obstructed the inquisition.” Bernard, in the first part of his surrender, at last uttered the words Fournier had long sought: “Despite the justifications and excuses put forth by me in my statements and responses on favoring and obstructing, I now admit my guilt.”

  The “queen of proofs” had been delivered. If Bernard had indeed wanted to topple the inquisition, no matter who staffed it, then by the logic of the day this was a moment of justice long delayed. If, on the other hand, he had done only what he had originally claimed—attack corrupt inquisitors—then on this day in Carcassonne there must have been darkness at noon. He had condemned himself to spare the Church embarrassment.

  On Saturday, December 8, 1319, crowds jammed the market square of the Bourg of Carcassonne. The great and the mean had gathered together. Of the former, there were prelates and noblemen and notables in their splendid finery, among them the bishops of Carcassonne, Mirepoix, and Elne, the abbots of Lagrasse and Montolieu, the count of Forez, the seneschal of Carcassonne, the knights François de Lévis, Guillaume de Voisins, Dalmas de Marciac, and Raimond Accurat-Comte, the judges of Verdun and Rivière, the eminent law professor Frisco Ricomanni, the lawyers Peire Vital and Peire Guille, and the consuls of Carcassonne. The humbler of the multitude—merchant and maiden, tradesman and alewife, friar and widow—had come from the streets leading to the marketplace, a variegated stream of medieval humanity. All had come to see Bernard, their enemy, their friend, their former nemesis, their erstwhile champion, the man they had heard vilified or praised, the holy or unholy priest their parents had told them so much about.

  There was no sermo generalis. This was not an inquisitorial proceeding. There was no stake, no chanting Dominicans, no talk of dogs returning to their vomit.

  Bernard stood in full view of the assembly, failing, sickly, undone. The judgments against him were to be read aloud. No mention of the friar’s adherence to the Spirituals was made. The original pretext for prosecution had been abandoned. Judgment was rendered.

  On the charge of killing the pope: not guilty.

  On the charge of treason: guilty.

  On the charge of obstructing the Holy Office: guilty.

  The reading began, a long, detailed, and sententious monument of stately prose and stern outrage. As his offenses were recounted Bernard stood silent, as thousands looked at him for the last time.

  His sentence arrived at the end of the reading. He was to be defrocked—he would no longer be member of the clergy, no longer be Brother Bernard. Although he had confessed and been given absolution, a just punishment, a penance, had to be inflicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Wall of Carcassonne—to the murus strictus, shackled solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water.

  Whether the sentence was too harsh or too lenient came to be answered conclusively later in the day at the episcopal palace, where Bernard was taken one last time for a formal ceremony to exclude him from the clergy. Following that moment of further degradation, a letter was addressed by Jacques Fournier and Raimond de Mostuéjouls to his new jailer, Jean de Beaune, the inquisitor of Carcassonne. Once beyond the customary flowery formalities, a surprising passage leaps out:

  Having finally assigned him to strict confinement in the Wall, situated between the Cité of Carcassonne and the Aude, subjecting him to perpetual imprisonment in irons and a diet of bread and water, We, out of consideration for his age and weakness, and particularly at this moment for the weakness that can be discerned in his hands, believe that he should be dispensed from performing this penance . . . and [thus] give you by this document the permission to exempt him from irons and fasting.

  This was a final twist, and, for his enemies, the last straw. The legal representatives of the French kin
g, Philip V, demanded that Bernard be turned over to them for execution. He no longer could claim the immunity of the cloth—he was no longer a clergyman. Their appeal was lodged the next day. Although a formal gesture, a type of jurisidictional chest-puffing between state and Church, the document stands out for the vehemence of its language. The last-minute clemency clearly had grated—and produced last-minute prose:

  He [Bernard] committed or encouraged others to commit many great and shameful crimes, shameful acts that were both criminal and harmful and that cannot be detailed without a long speech, that should stir up a tempest of the elements, and for which he should suffer death not once, but many times, if human nature would only allow it.

  Fournier and his colleague were having none of it. They flatly rejected the appeal. They had punished Bernard enough by putting him the friar of carcassonne | 201 in the Wall he so detested and which he would never leave. For his contemporaries, the softened sentence seemed lenient. If, indeed, he was guilty of heresy through systematically trying to bring down the inquisition, then by the cruel standards of the day he deserved not imprisonment but death.

  Yet behind Fournier’s final act of compassion, there might be another consideration. Fournier, for all his rectitude, was not a softhearted man: to be an inquisitor of his stature, one had to have no compunction about ruining lives for matters that could very well have been ignored—and were, by other churchmen of his own day. The mercy Fournier accorded Délicieux may have proceeded from scruple. He had been dispatched by the pope to do a job, and he had done it. Yet if the final confession made by Bernard had been false, extracted under threat and given to save ecclesiastical face, Fournier would have known that only too well. It would have nagged at his conscience. If, as the Franciscan had maintained until the very last moment, he had acted only against inquisitorial abuse and not the inquisition itself, then he had done no wrong. In showing mercy to Bernard, Jacques Fournier may have been asking God for mercy for himself.